Arts Watch.

`Nixon' A Well-done Summit Of Egos

February 29, 2000|By Richard Christiansen, Tribune Chief Critic.

Leaping from fact to fantasia, playwright Russell Lees has written "Nixon's Nixon," a screwball tragedy based on a private meeting that President Richard M. Nixon held the night before his resignation with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The meeting actually occurred, on Aug. 7, 1974; but what happened in it is wide open to speculation. Lees, working from the few facts known about the event, has gleefully charged into the unknown, conjuring up a surreal 90 minutes in which the deposed commander-in-chief and his anxious aide vent their frustrations and weigh their options in a summit meeting of egos.

Nixon, cursing his enemies in foul-mouthed abandon, and Kissinger, trying to keep his career afloat amid the wreckage of the Nixon presidency, are men on the edge, proudly looking back on accomplishments while fearfully looking to uncertain futures.

Part of the evening's events has Nixon cajoling Kissinger into reliving some of their past triumphs with world leaders, a method of flashback that has Kissinger, in his Teutonic accent, at various times pretending to be Mao Tse-tung, Leonid Brezhnev and John F. Kennedy.

The two men argue with and threaten each other, drink immense quantities of vodka and brandy, and wind up concocting a wildly insane international crisis that they imagine would save the presidency. In the end, however, the game-playing ends, and they come crashing down to reality. Nixon, on his knees in defiant prayer, is joined by Kissinger, pitying the disgraced, distraught leader, but keeping one eye open for a way to save his own hide.

In the small back-store playhouse of Writers' Theatre Chicago, director Michael Halberstam has staged this wild affair with lip-smacking relish, keeping his two actors moving between the audience and the tiny stage suggesting the White House area.

William Brown, owlish, with heavy horn-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, and with his paunch plumped out to match the "Machiavelli with a belly" image of "Super K," has the more restrained portrayal, weighing his words, a la Kissinger, but erupting into flashes of rage or fear.

Larry Yando's Nixon, on the other hand, is all feverish intensity, ever the scheming Tricky Dick, but also the pathetic statesman-gone-sour, grieving over his own lost Camelot and weeping over the pain he has caused his daughter Julie.

Both men suggest their characters without resorting to caricature. They're two actors putting themselves through a rough evening, but enjoying it. Yando even sweats in the Nixon style.